UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres arrived in Haiti on Monday for a two-day visit as violence from armed gangs continued to devastate communities across the country, with more than 2,300 people killed in the first half of 2026 alone.
The visit, which ran from June 16 to June 17, was intended to draw international attention to a crisis that has worsened significantly since the beginning of this year. Guterres met with members of Haiti’s transitional government, humanitarian workers and community leaders in Port-au-Prince, calling on the international community to significantly increase both security support and humanitarian funding.
Gang networks now control substantial portions of Haiti’s capital and key urban areas, displacing hundreds of thousands of civilians. The Viv Ansanm coalition, which emerged as the dominant gang alliance in 2023, has continued to expand its territorial reach despite the deployment of a Kenyan-led multinational security mission that began in 2024.
A new Gang Suppression Force of fewer than 1,000 troops, drawing contributions from Jamaica, Chad, El Salvador and Guatemala, has been deployed in recent weeks. Analysts say the force is too small and too lightly equipped to reverse the security situation without considerably more resources and a clearer operational mandate.
Guterres acknowledged the limitations directly. He called for an immediate expansion of the multinational mission and said member states had been too slow to commit the forces and financing Haiti needed. Haiti’s transitional government has been unable to hold elections amid the violence, leaving the country without a democratically elected government since 2021.
The UN’s humanitarian appeal for Haiti in 2026 has been significantly underfunded. Of roughly $900 million requested for the year, less than a third had been received by mid-June. Aid workers say the shortfall is affecting food distribution, medical care and shelter programs for displaced people.
The scale of the Haitian crisis has drawn comparisons to other ongoing emergencies the UN is monitoring. Earlier this year, Congo’s Ebola outbreak prompted similar warnings about the gap between need and international response. The EU migration pact that came into force this month has also reshaped how European states handle arrivals from crisis zones including the Caribbean.
Haiti’s football team was simultaneously competing at World Cup 2026 during the week of Guterres’s visit, with Scotland facing Haiti in Group D on June 14 — a moment that underscored the country’s complicated place in the global imagination. UN peacekeeping operations have maintained a presence in Haiti through various mandates since 2004.
Guterres is expected to brief the Security Council on his findings. For now, Haiti remains one of the world’s most acute humanitarian emergencies — with an international response that has yet to match the scale of the crisis.
